LYNSEY McCULLOCH AND EMILY WINEROCK
[1] Dance was a key cultural practice of the early modern period: it was integral to theatrical representation; it was a significant element of court ritual; and it fulfilled an important social function. But how might we characterise the particular dance practices of Northern Europe? French, Spanish and Italian traditions have dominated histories of Renaissance dance and have come to represent all European dance in the period. However, as Nona Monahin in her contribution to this issue shows us, while dancing masters were active teachers and choreographers across France, Spain and Italy, dance was also integral to Northern European culture and society.
[2] More recent accounts of Renaissance movement practice have challenged the conflation of North and South in discussions of early European dance, drawing attention to the myriad regional and national variations at work. Jennifer Nevile, discussing the moresca and drawing upon the earlier work of dance historians Barbara Sparti and John Forrest, describes how the ‘conflation of accounts from Northern Europe with those from Italy, as well as accounts of moresche performed by members of the elite as opposed to performances by artisans and craftsmen, has led to a confusion regarding the origins of this dance type, and a misunderstanding as to its significance and what it symbolized.’ (Nevile 2015: 597) The tendency to align similar but geographically and socially specific dances robs them of their particularity, but it also has the effect of privileging Southern European centres of early dance over the Northern peripheries. In this issue, essays by Fabio Ciambella and Emily Winerock challenge the dominance of Southern European dance in their studies of morris dancing and danced depictions of witchcraft respectively.
[3] Recent dance scholarship has also complicated our understanding of cultural transfer. No longer a one-way process in which Northern European nations mimicked the choreographies of their Southern counterparts, the transfer of dance knowledge is now understood to have been a complex geographical exchange (Miller Renberg and Phillis 2021). This special issue seeks to continue this vital work, celebrating the particularities of Northern Renaissance dance and resituating it within a wider European context. In this issue, Lynneth Miller Renberg navigates these complex interactions in addressing the cross-cultural relations of England, Scandinavia and the wider continent in her essay on medieval and early modern parish dancing. And while this issue concentrates its attention on the imagined centres and peripheries of European dance practice, it is mindful of a much broader global influence on identity and performance (Ndiaye 2022).
[4] Focusing on the neighbouring ‘North Sea parishes’ of England and western Scandinavia, Lynneth Miller Renberg documents parish dancing as an integral part of medieval and early modern community life. The scarcity of source material for this type of dancing—in contrast, as Miller Renberg points out, to the early modern dance manuals and other archives that serve scholarship of southern European dance—is one example of the challenges that researchers in this area face. Renberg, met with an even greater paucity of parish records in western Scandinavia, uses English sources to elucidate Norwegian and Icelandic traditions—drawing attention to the shared practices of Northern European nations and making the case for a dance history of the Northern Renaissance. Records of parish dance for this period are, in fact, more abundant in the British Isles than in continental Europe. In other words, for specific dance practices, such as parish dance, a focus on the North is essential to the historical retrieval of a significant European dance genre. That this genre is situated latterly in reformation culture/s points also to the limitations of a dance history dominated by Catholic societies and traditions.
[5] In studying parish dancing in several regions of Northern Europe, Miller Renberg brilliantly demonstrates how the cross-border circulation of sermon literature hardened attitudes towards dance, representing social dancing as sinful and transgressive, associated principally with female acts of sacrilege. Religious networks, active in sharing theological materials, ensured that this same message—distinct from the closer association further south of dance and sexual sin—reached parishioners across Northern Europe. Contained within tales of revelling carolers, cursed to remain dancing for a year, and alongside sermons based on Salome’s danced transgressions, anti-dance messaging sought to police local behaviour and protect sacred spaces from violation. But this does not mean that dancing did not take place in these religious contexts. Dance performances by the lay population were a feature of many parish festivities, including religious festivals and fundraisers. Miller Renberg presents ‘two different and competing models of dance: one that represented parish ritual and practice of piety, and one that rhetorically connected dance to sin and sacrilege.’ The coexistence of these two models was, suggests Miller Renberg, distinctly Northern. While derived from the same Latin sources consulted in France and Italy during this period, Scandinavian and Middle English texts referencing dance depart from southern European examples, suggesting a unique Northern dance sensibility.
[6] While Miller Renberg examines early dance as practised in ‘North Sea’ communities, Emily Winerock addresses dance in a theatrical context—using the representation of witches in early modern English play texts to address the complex interplay of Northern and Southern European cultural traditions. Despite the ubiquity of continental sources relating to female witchcraft—in which gendered sexual deviance was often foregrounded—depictions of witches on the English stage proved remarkably resistant to outside influence. That this resistance is visible in their dancing points to the importance of movement practice as a marker of cultural identity. Notwithstanding the identification of staged dance in early modern England with sexual impropriety, dancing witches in the drama of William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson and Thomas Middleton, amongst others, were characterised by their strangeness rather than their sexuality. The ‘strange fantastic motions’ described by Ben Jonson in his 1609 Masque of Queens, performed at court, were replicated in the public theatre, where performers inverted dance custom by, for example, dancing back to back or moving counterclockwise.
[7] Winerock provides persuasive and dance-attentive readings of William Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton’s Macbeth, Middleton’s The Witch and Richard Brome and Thomas Heywood’s The Late Lancashire Witches. What these readings suggest is that early modern English drama employed dance to convey complex and subtle meaning. As Miller Renberg distinguishes between sexual sin and sacrilege in parish dance practices, Winerock carefully delineates here between antic inversion and sexual wantonness in staged choreographies. This delineation speaks to the geographical focus of this special issue. While acknowledging the evidence for a pan-European dance culture, Winerock makes the case for regional variation and a British, or Northern, response to female transgression and its danced representation.
[8] In keeping with the antic focus of Winerock’s essay, Fabio Ciambella explores the controversial figure of English actor and dancer Will Kemp. As an actor, Kemp is best known as one of the original shareholders, or ‘sharers’, in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, alongside the company’s resident playwright, William Shakespeare. But, as a dancer, Kemp provides us with valuable insight into early English dance, both the staged jigs that took place in London’s playhouses and the folk traditions Kemp harnessed in his infamous morris dance from London to Norwich in 1600. While Kemp’s theatrical persona was subject to contemporary critique—Ciambella notes the invective against clowns in the Q1 edition of Hamlet—his dancing abilities were apparently not in doubt, prompting John Marston in his 1599 The Scourge of Villainy to announce that ‘the orbes celestiall / Will daunce Kemps Iigge’. And, as Ciambella ably demonstrates, much of Kemp’s self-image and self-celebration are predicated on feats of dancing prowess. His Nine Days Wonder—Kemp’s written account of his endurance morris dance from London to Norwich—records numerous examples of athletic leaps and energetic capers. It presents dance as a competitive sport; Kemp, the professional dancer, is able to outperform and outlast the members of the public who join his morris along the way. Ciambella’s pragmastylistic reading of Kemp’s text, providing a linguistic analysis in the context of Kemp’s social interactions, offers compelling evidence of Kemp’s stylistic self-aggrandisement, an attempt to redeem his reputation following his resignation from the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in 1599.
[9] While Ciambella’s primary focus is on Kemp’s self-representation in print and the function of dance as a marker of social distinction, he also draws our attention to the morris as a ubiquitous dance in the England of this period. The morris’s origins remain unclear—its ‘moorish’ connections still debated—but its enduring ‘Englishness’ raises questions about the characterisation of national and regional dances and what such labels denote and disguise. In identifying a dance as Northern, we should not elide the many elements, including those that are non-European, that influence choreographic processes.
[10] Our special issue closes with Nona Monahin’s invaluable catalogue of extant dance sources from early modern Europe. While acknowledging that dance appears in a myriad of sources in this period—including the parish records, pamphlets, and play-texts cited by our other contributors—Monahin focuses here on notated choreographies, both published and unpublished. These include dance manuals or treatises, alongside less systematic choreographic collections and individual notes. Monahin provides us with details of these works’ contents, origins, and current location. She also points to examples of secondary literature addressing these works. Organised by geographical region, Monahin’s source list confirms, to some extent, the dominance of French and Italian dancing practice in the late Medieval and Renaissance periods. However, it also draws our attention to significant levels of dance activity in England and other parts of Northern Europe. And, in surveying the sources originating from France and Burgundy, we can see that several were created by dancing masters located in Brussels and the Burgundian, later Habsburg, Netherlands. More importantly perhaps, Monahin’s source list illuminates the way in which early dance travelled. As dancing masters moved across the continent, so too did choreographies. In meeting and merging with the dancing traditions of new territories, these choreographies no longer represented a single regional identity, if indeed they ever did. Monahin offers the example of a recently discovered early seventeenth-century manuscript, held in the Kungliga Biblioteket in Stockholm, Sweden’s National Library. Containing the work of a French dancing master active in Brussels, the text resists classification on the basis of nationality. The difficulties we have in classifying works such as these are, in fact, a helpful warning against a reductive labelling of Renaissance choreographies. Monahin’s careful and detailed source list helps us to navigate this pan-European dance.
[11] Finally, the purpose of this special issue is not to claim, or reclaim, dance for Northern Europe but rather to propose a broader and more open conception of dance as a geographically situated practice, one in which a complex interchange of movement, music, art, literature, religion and societal influences produces new choreographies. Our understanding of this process should include Northern Europe, not as the beneficiary of movement practice that originated elsewhere, but as one of many important regions in the development of early dance.
Works Cited
Miller Renberg, Lynneth, and Bradley Phillis, (eds). 2021. The Cursed Carolers in Context. New York: Routledge.
Ndiaye, Noémie. 2022. Scripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance Culture and The Making of Race. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Nevile, Jennifer. 2015. ‘Decorum and Desire: Dance in Renaissance Europe and the Maturation of a Discipline.’ Renaissance Quarterly 68, no. 2: 597.